Explainable Security
Luca Viganò, Daniele Magazzeni · 2020
In 2017, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) program that aims to create a suite of new AI techniques that enable end users to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage the emerging generation of AI systems. In this paper, inspired by DARPA's XAI program, we propose a new paradigm in security research: Explainable Security (XSec). We discuss the "Six Ws" of XSec (Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?) and argue that XSec has unique and complex characteristics: XSec involves several different stakeholders (i.e., the system's developers, analysts, users and attackers) and is multi-faceted by nature (as it requires reasoning about system model, threat model and properties of security, privacy and trust as well as concrete attacks, vulnerabilities and countermeasures). We define a roadmap for XSec that identifies several possible research directions.